Monday, July 04, 2016

Quick Fixes for Some Mac Problems

Mac is one of the best computers used and it is mostly used because of its smooth experience and behavior. And also have a lot of special features. Like I said the Mac experience is but smooth, but the OS X platform isn’t 100% free of problems. There are chances that you might come across some audio glitches, booting issues, file transfer woes, iCloud sync problems, overheating sooner or later.Actually, fixing some Mac issues is a real pain in the neck. So in this article, we’ll discuss about some common frustrating problems that many users, especially Mac newbies. So the good news is that you can fix them quickly and easily because we’ve explained how you can solve some common problems you might come across. So the first thing in order to get started is to open the System Preferences which will be used throughout this guide. So go ahead and open System Preferences.Note: You can navigate to the individual preference settings panes faster if you use the search box at the top right in System Preferences. The Split View not workingSearch for: set up spacesThe Split View feature added to Mac is very useful even though it is not that wide like that of Windows 10. This enables you to view two open applications side by side. But the Split View would only work if you could get it to work.Probably you are not doing it in the right way or maybe it just need some tweak. It should work by just clicking and holding the green full-screen button in an application window to move the window to a side of the screen. So if it refuses to open then you’ll have to use some workaround to do this. So in the Mission Control preference pane, click on the checkbox next to “Displays have separate Spaces”, then log out from your user account, and log back in to make it faster. The split view will start working once you’ve done this.And of course, there are numerous applications that doesn’t support Split View feature, one of the notably applications is Microsoft Word.Scrolling direction feels abnormalWhen dragging two fingers down the trackpad of your Mac, the onscreen content also moves down i.e. it tracks your finger movement by default. And Apple phrases this scrolling direction “natural”. However, if you’re used to the way you normally scroll on Windows then you might want to change the scrolling behavior.So in case you want to use the other way of scrolling down to move content up, navigate to Trackpad > Scroll & Zoom, under it, uncheck the box next to Scroll direction: natural.Apps Downloaded from the Internet Won’t OpenYou can search for: security settingsBy default, Mac blocks apps that aren’t downloaded directly from the App Store or from an identified developer. So whenever you try to install such an app, you’ll always get a message like this one:In order to open the app in question, navigate to Security & Privacy > General, then click on “Open Anyway” next to the app name that was blocked. To remove this message for good, search for the Allow apps downloaded from: field and select Anywhere. So in case the option appears grayed out, you’ll need to click on the lock icon at the bottom of this pane and log in with your admin password to unlock this option.But always put this in mind that installing apps downloaded from “anywhere” puts your Mac at risk i.e. if you install an app from a shady source. And truth is Macs are not immune to malware. Sometimes legit sources join the dark side, so make sure the sources you are downloading from is good.Spotlight searches showing irrelevant resultsYou can search for: spotlight search categoriesSpotlight is added to Mac to make finding things easier for you. But sometimes, Spotlights usually show some irrelevant results and some of these results are queried from different category like Fonts. In that case, why not make Spotlight to stop showing the results from Fonts and any other unwanted or unused categories? So you can easily do that by heading to Spotlight > Search Results, and unchecking the boxes for categories you’d like to hide from Spotlight searches.Spotlight searches showing results from Private FoldersYou can search for: block search of private filesIn case you want to keep some certain folders or you don’t want them to be crawled out by Spotlight, then it would be best to tell Spotlight not to search for those folders. So to do that head to Spotlight > Privacy and then click on the “+” (plus) button in order to add individual folders or disks that you would like Spotlight to exclude from search results.Unwanted Apps running automatically when you boot your MacYou can search for: login itemsDo you that the higher the number of apps set to launch automatically when you boot your Mac, the slower the startup process? We’ve explained how you can disable apps that start automatically when you boot your Mac in our of old articles. You can easily amend startup items and stop unwanted apps from running at startup through the Users & Groups.So navigate to Users & Groups, select your account from the sidebar and click on the Login Items tab. Then you’ll see a list of apps that runs automatically at startup. Now select the checkboxes for all apps that you’d like to remove and click on the “-” (minus) icon below the list.Invalid Preference Panes Continue to Show UpWhen some apps are installed, they usually add a preference pane to your System Preference. And by default, preference panes added by a third-party app to System Preferences often goes away when you uninstall the app. So in case for some reason you uninstalled the app and the dormant or obsolete pane gets left behind even after uninstalling the app, right-click on the pane to find the Remove option for it. Obviously, this option won’t be available for stock panes.So always remember to use the Remove option for a persistent preference pane after you have uninstalled its app in one of the usual ways i.e. either by deleting it from Launchpad, dragging it to Trash, or by getting rid of it with app cleaner software.Hopefully these tweaks can fix a few of your most common Mac annoyances!. So if you have some issues with your Mac or there are some fixes you would like to add, simply comment them in the comment box below.